Bleeding Edge Takes the Sensibility of Ninja Theory's DMC Design to a Competitive Multiplayer Mode

Bleeding Edge was a surprise at the Microsoft press conference at E3 2019. The next Ninja Theory project is a competitive game in the vein of something like Overwatch or Apex Legends, with two teams of four players trying to capture goals while lamenting. One and the other. It's quite different from previous studio games – third-person narrative action titles such as Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and DmC: Devil May Cry.

Bleeding Edge is looking to marry online competition games with the kind of fighting experiences you can expect from Ninja Theory. It's mainly a kind of competitive brawler – the majority of characters are specialized in melee combat. Think Overwatch, but fewer weapons and more combos.

This is the kind of creative director that Rahni Tucker wanted to play. So this is the one she and her team created, she told GameSpot at E3.

"For me, fighting is my interest, that's what I like to do," Tucker said. "At home, I play multiplayer games as a team, so it seemed like a natural synergy, like," Ah! "I thought this game did not exist and I would like to play it, so why not do it?" It's just the game I really love, my passion project. "

Short-range combat

In Bleeding Edge, most characters are melee fighters, even though there are different roles among the actors. Some are support class fighters with ranged attacks, intended to stay out of the scrum to heal or polish their teammates, while others look like tanks and are designed to approach and destroy the people. Each of the 10 characters has a variety of abilities, which we tried during a match we played at Microsoft Showcase. Daemon, the melee DPS fighter, for example, carries a samurai sword, can briefly make himself invisible and uses a quick move to fill in gaps and gain quick hits. The Maeve witch can encircle her opponents in place and siphon their lives, while the Buttercup brandishing a saw has a Roadhog-style chain that can attract its enemies. All of these abilities have a cooldown, and each character also has an ultimate hit that grows with time; The ultimate demon has turned it into a fast-cutting killing machine against anyone stumbling within a certain radius around it. Each character has two ultimate goals to choose from at the start of a match.

I was like "Where's the third-person action fight and the competitive multiplayer?"

The game we played was on an industrial map with a railway crossing the center – and passing over its three control points. Capturing these spots reports your team points (as do those killed on landing), but trains that occasionally scan the map are a danger to avoid or use against the other team. The map also included jump zones that allowed for higher levels, adding a certain verticality, as well as health slumps scattered around, essential to stay alive.

It's all the kind of things you expect from other character-based competition games. Bleeding Edge stands out for his fight, however; everything feels a lot more like MOBA as two teams converge and begin to lament one another. As soon as you fight, the action-adventure pedigree of the Ninja Theory team asserts. Hitting an enemy with a series of melee strikes can stun him, and associating regular attacks with your special abilities can extend a combo and allow you to repel your opponents. You also have a dodge movement that helps you to free yourself from a combo run by someone else, but his charges are limited and require you to think about the best way to do it. Use your movements to control the fight and avoid getting locked up.

"The bottom line, in my opinion, lies in the design sensibilities that make the fight more enjoyable because the playing game is very different, as you know," Tucker said. "Single-player hack-and-slash games, you can play against 50 players and have them all in front, and make a combo of 50 moves without having anything to do." But playing against that is not very fun. [Bleeding Edge] It's really a team game and it's an important thing that I wanted, because I like playing support and you can not do it if it's not a team game. It was important to me too. I think it's one of the things that people come across a bit when they see a third-person action: they say, "Oh, cool, I'm just going to rush and kill everything!" And it's like, well, yes, but they are too. You can not face four people and kill everything because they are as powerful as you.

"The thing that I bring, I think, from DMC in this area, is the sensitivity to design.So, for the fight to run smoothly, that the hits bind, the animation fluid, you feel good in your hand, has good control of the answer. "

This may not exactly resemble DmC, but Bleeding Edge captures this sense of strategic and responsive fighting, while reinforcing the frenetic unpredictability inherent in the clash of other players.

Modding your heroes

Bleeding Edge also stands out from the way you can customize your characters. As Tucker explains, the title of the game is a friendly competition between cyborgs that will take place in fifty years or so. The characters are all at the forefront of the cybernetic modification of the body, using technology to do all sorts of strange things, and fighting and exploding are the way they test their latest improvements.

Customization is part of the underlying premise. So, in addition to choosing different characters with different abilities (and switching from one to the other to adjust your strategy), you can also unlock "mods" to install on your characters, which change the way their abilities work. Each character has three mod slots and you can unlock more character-specific mods over time (there are about 20 of them), allowing you to create different loads of each character that match your playing style and to the strategies of a match. .

The thing that I bring, I think, DMC in this area is the sensitivity to design. "

"Using Daemon as an example, his default mod game is basic attack / damage, some extra health, and greater range for shots, but if you want, you can go completely into, say, the Stealth and you can have a mod that makes stealth hard still, you have a mod that makes it move faster and there is a mod, say, that inflicts additional damage to stealth.You can equip these three in a build and call it stealthy construction, then if you play in a team where you do not really need to worry about survival and you just want to work around the back and kill [support character] Zero Cool over and over again, so you could take this build. "

It sounds like a powerful recipe for competitive play, and Bleeding Edge has created fun and chaotic moments as the eight players lamented trying to take control points in our game. It's hard to gauge after a single battle, of course, but Bleeding Edge's melee combat has a depth that should appeal to MOBA fans and other competitive games, with clear, easy-going artistic style. and an accessibility facilitating the handling. The question is whether Bleeding Edge can make a difference in a crowded competitive gaming market – but at the very least, it has the potential to make itch fighting disappear, which no other game of this type would # 39; addresses.

Although Bleeding Edge has not yet determined its price or release date, Tucker said that Ninja Theory intended to support the game after the launch with additional characters (there are 10 at the time of launch and Ninja Theory teasing two others) and maps (beyond the other three will be available at the exit). Tucker also stated that she also wanted to work on a more robust viewer mode. Microsoft and Ninja Theory also released a technical alpha on June 27th which you can sign up for on the Bleeding Edge website.